Leopard’s new Parental Controls features are very flexible, and allow for a huge variety of restrictions on non-administrator user accounts. One group of these features is setting “Time Limits” for accounts, giving you the ability to limit their computer use to a specified amount of time on weekdays, another amount for weekends, and to set [...]

Another piece of eye candy I found today in Leopard involves Stacks. If you hold down Shift when clicking on a stack, it will fan or grid out in slow motion. This can be done with minimizing windows as well, as we described a while back here.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leopard, Eye Candy, OS X, Stacks, [...]

Happy Halloween everyone! An hour of free time and I came up with the below pumpkin–I’m not an artist by any means :). Don’t eat too much candy–I know I already have.

Technorati Tags: halloween, mac-o-lantern

As a follow-up to my last post, I decided to write a very simple MacTips RSS widget to keep you updated.
Here’s the widget –> MacTips.wdgt.zip
Here’s the code–> MacTips.zip

Technorati Tags: Developer, Programming, Widgets

Apple claims that if you know how to create a website, you can create a widget. That happens to be true because there’s really not much else to it: widgets are written in html, javascript, ajax and in any other thing that you would use for a website.
There’s a very in-depth tutorial here [...]

Every day I seem to discover yet another way to switch between Spaces in Leopard. Apple has really done an amazing job at making Spaces work how you want it to work, while keeping most of the features from interfering with your workflow.
To switch between Spaces through the Menu Bar, begin by launching System Preferences. [...]

Here is the first in a series of roundups covering the most popular posts in a given time frame, arranged by date. The Leopard tips have been the most popular, by far, and we’ve got many more coming. Check them all out here.
October 24: Hack iPod Video to Upgrade to new iPod Classic Firmware
October 26: [...]

Some people, like me, do not have external hard drives big enough to use for full backups using Time Machine. Although I recommend buying a big external drive, you can still use Time Machine for your more precious files on smaller drives.
First of all, launch the “System Preferences” application. Under the “System” header, select the [...]

Ever since OS X 10.2, Apple has included a very good tool to help developers refine the speech synthesis for any word.
The idea is that you may sometime want to have a word pronounced in a slightly different way that OS X regularly does. Maybe, simply have it sound more natural -perhaps even with a [...]

As we all know, OS X has fairly good speech synthesis/recognition capabilities; however, the real good news is that these resources are actually there, open for any developer to use them. If you have the developer kit installed, there are a number of great manuals and examples of the kind of things you can do [...]